The Iron Triangle of New Business
This post originally appeared in my weekly newsletter, BL&T (Borrowed, Learned, & Thought). Subscribe
Borrowed
“It’s worth reminding ourselves that clients can smell fear and are repelled by it. They are attracted to a service provider who will be honest and direct with them, even if it might jeopardize the relationship.”
From “Getting Naked” by Patrick M. Lencioni [Book]
Learned
I’d never heard of the iron triangle concept until a few weeks ago. Martin Barnes, a British engineer, drew it in 1969 for a course on project cost and time. His corners were time, cost, and quality. Many know it as “good, fast, cheap, pick two.”
I often see what we do as an agency as no different from the various services people hire to take care of their homes: landscapers, electricians, contractors, plumbers. Just people providing services to other people. And the iron triangle applies. A contractor can’t finish a project faster without more people on site or longer days; either way, it requires more hours, which means more money. If you want to spend less, you wait while they fit your job around others.
The one corner nobody wants to give up is quality. No one hires a contractor hoping for a worse job, and no client wants a worse website so it launches sooner. Anyone who has gone with the cheapest bid knows how that usually turns out. “You get what you pay for.” So let’s say quality is the assumption, which leaves speed and budget. In this framework, a tighter timeline costs more, and a tighter budget takes longer.
Where I’ve been thinking about this a lot is our sales process, the real test. Over the past month or so, we’ve talked to a lot of prospects in a rush to launch by the holiday season or before 2027. The challenge is that when the proposal states a December launch, we win and draft an SOW that says the same, and then it takes another month to sign. We just lost a month. The launch date stays put, but the time we have to hit it shrinks.
The simple way we’re thinking about this now is to treat any hard deadline as a sales tool. If a client wants to launch on February 1st, we work backward and provide a date by which we need a signature, and a date before that by which we need to know if they’d like to move forward. If those dates slip, we have two options: keep the budget and move the launch, or keep the launch and adjust the budget. And the tough reality is that if they want it faster and cheaper, it’s likely a red flag.
But like many things, this is all easier said than done. When a brand we’re excited about working with has a tight timeline, the instinct is to figure it out. We often do, but if we’re not careful, we rush and quality goes. When that happens, the client loses the one corner they assumed was safe, and we put their trust and our reputation on the line. I’d rather have the harder conversation about time and budget before we sign, work together to figure it out, and start on the right path.
Thought
What corners am I sacrificing?
